Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/225

 Rh the candle, and gets into bed, a reward for the labours of the day such as the world cannot give, and patience and time await to give him all that the world can give': those noble, lovely, pathetic and prophetic words, are quoted at the end of the article without comment, as if to quote them was enough. It was.

In 1803 William Blake sold to Thomas Butts eleven drawings for fourteen guineas. In 1903 twelve water-colour drawings in illustration of L'Allegro and II Penseroso were sold for £1960, and the twenty-one water-colour drawings for Job for £5600. These figures have their significance, but the significance must not be taken to mean any improvement in individual taste. When a selection from the pictures in the Butts collection was on view at Sotheby's I heard a vulgar person with a loud voice, a dealer or a dealer's assistant, say with a guffaw: 'It would make me sick to have these things round my room.' That vulgar person represents the eternal taste of the multitude; only, in the course of a hundred years, a few men of genius have repeated after one another that Blake was a man of genius, and